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Already I can see a few uninformed individuals making giant assumptions or just outright "ooh crybabies!" posts.
This issue is just one an aspect of the maelstrom of distributors vs retailers vs customers in Australia.

If you don't live here (in Australia) and think Australians should be charged (quite often) upwards of twice the price for things.. Fuck off and die in a house fire. You're a bad person. Well, no, that's not exactly true, what you are is a dick with an opinion (that is wrong). Please educate yourself or die in a house fire - your choice. Should I work twice as long so I can experience the same product as you? Obviously not. Prices should most definitely be sold with "economies of scale" in mind, yes. Do you have $90 US games? We do. Skyrim, for instance - and that's through digital distribution!

The ultimate question is always this. Why can I have "some guy" on ebay in the UK ship me 1 single copy of a game through snail mail (expensive) to Australia and still end up paying 60% of the price of the game, locally. Why? how is that possible? It can only be possible because somewhere in the market we are getting fucked over. There is no other reason. If I can buy 1000 copies of a game, I can get a better price. SomeGuyInABedroomOnEbay98 can trump the entire Australian retail sector walking into a shop in the UK (and just so you know, the UK are also victims of this gauging) and paying for a SINGLE UNIT to be shipped to Australia.

But, we're evolving. Even the previously unsavvy commoner is going online to get a better price - We're just buying stuff from people around the world, that realise they can exploit this gauging themselves. And thank (whoever) for them ! Thank you! Please, feel free to get on board. Ship the products bought locally to us! Meanwhile, the retailers are seeing diminishing sales, crying foul and attempting to have us taxed, so they can continue to exist without evolving.

The key point in here is that there is always someone either gauging or offsetting their shitty distribution chain management onto the customer. A guy on ebay can beat them. Distributors and retailers will have to evolve. One of the mechanisms that will facilitate this is by mandating that prices in this country MUST be justifiably so.

Seems to me you've deliberately used rather trivial scenarios to further your point, there, sir. On the other side of that coin, I've attempted to rape you. I'm thinking there might be just be a part of you that can empathize with such a reaction, even if you disagree with it.

There are enough zealots on this site to be unimpressed, regardless of the achievement. They're the type of people who'd be "unimpressed" if you had a microsoft mobile platform running WoW with a "pathetic" 90% code sharing.

Is there a way I can filter all KDawson articles out? Rather than endlessly whine about it, I'm looking for a way to return slashdot to the way it used to be. That is, with some integrity. I think I've read three piece of shit, antagonistically misleading articles posted by this bastion of all that is wrong with journalism today alone.

Having thought about this for a little while, it occurs to me that it's not so difficult as I envisioned, initially, to comprehend why they think they can get away with this.

It's due to the enviable, massive success of MMO gaming, thesedays - all of which is basically running this type of DRM, albeit in a socially acceptable manner, by virtue of the fact that they are "online" games, only.

Companies wanting this sort of DRM and to truly combat privacy need to build it in conjunction with a legitimate online component. You see this practice becoming more prevalent with companies choosing to do away with standard server models, instead, taking full control of their online component with their own multiplayer deployment. Sure, you get some industrious individuals managing to get onto these much more secure networks, but all in all, this is a form of DRM that is actually quite effective.

But, if there is something I've learned for the Modern Warfare 2 release, it's that people who are unhappy about aspects of it still BUY THE GAME. The reality is that for all the righteous indignation bandied around on forums and so forth, it still means a very minor percentage of people will actually put their big words into action. So, like it or not, they can get away with it. Remember all the woe of WoW users? So few of them quit. As I say, like it not, people can be exploited. If you have hype and you can get away with a lot of naughty stuff.

I wager this will result in a crescendo of personal affirmations of how you've never bowed down in such a situation. Well, that's great. You are in the minority.

Whilst your results may vary, I see a lot and I mean a lot of brash cheaters using aimbots (ie, killing 4 people in completely different parts of their view in the killcam of your death) and the main issue for me is that we have not at least given an option to kick the cheaters. In my experience, the cheaters often hang around. Why? Because as steam have said, they are not interested in your videos of people cheating, they will detect them (or will not).

The lobby is often unreliable and is a problem, but really, adding in the capacity to kick a cheater through high majority vote will drastically decrease the more game breaking issue - cheating in the first place.

There are a lot of people who probably play and don't see brash cheaters, leading them to think that people are just complaining. If you see a person's target warp around and kill 4 people in a heartbeat, that's brash cheating, not a good player taking you down.

That with such quantity, there would likely be now, an introduced percentage of support requests regarding faulty / non working devices. Furthermore, the emails will cease to be kindly worded requests for account reclamation aid from Blizzard and take on the air of (in some cases) "addict rage" as the realisation that the account is locked until the authentication device arrives X days after.

Pardon my good sense, but isn't the only real response to this for anyone who isn't satisfied to just stop paying them anything at all and go play something else?

As with any situation where a dev doesn't give the players what they want, the only way to send a message is to stop paying for a sub-par product and go support something that you enjoy.

Yes, it is. But, good sense and "real" has nothing to do with a lot of complaints in this type of situation, where a largely free service goes paid. Much of it has to do with Customer Nazi Syndrome and the notion that companies are immediately evil for vulgar displays of seeking profit. After all, if one mentions revenue and such, one must be engaged in ripping someone off.

In a situation such as this, where there is very little comment necessary other than the negative, it might seem as if they are the majority - but actually it's mostly just the tossers demanding the earth. The rest of us just move on or get onboard.

If the cost of items goes up and to "stay competitive" one has to spend more money, I think it's fairly obvious that the cost of staying competitive is likely to change.